Modern advancements in industrial plant operations include the use of field devices. Field devices control local plant operations such as collecting data from sensor systems, monitoring the local environment for alarm conditions, and actuating valves and breakers. The proliferation and evolution of digital communications has significantly enhanced the intelligence of these field devices.
In response to the increasing intelligence of field devices used in industrial plants, sophisticated device management systems have been developed to collect, process, optimize, and maintain information related to the field devices. These device management systems enable users to access the intelligent field devices through host system user interfaces or through dedicated terminals. The access permits the users to change settings and make other adjustments required to diagnose, maintain, and optimize performance of the field devices, their related components, and device networks.
As well known to those of skill in the art, a field device tool (FDT) interface specification, better known as FDT frame application architecture, exists to simplify and standardize control of intelligent field devices. An integral component of the conventional FDT frame application architecture includes a device type manager (DTM).
DTMs are provided by the intelligent field device vendor and delivered to customers along with the field device. The DTM is programmed to contain all of the information relevant to operation of its corresponding field device. The device DTM is the unique vendor supplied plug-in software used to access all information within the intelligent field device.
An instance of this vendor supplied software, however, must be created individually for each field device. Some device DTMs have a large memory footprint, which has led FDT Frame Applications to limit the number of device DTM instances active in memory and to cache the remaining ones, which causes severe performance degradation as system size increases and limits the display of live data to the currently selected device DTMs.
Another component integral to the FDT frame application is the fieldbus device. The FDT frame application and the associated DTMs typically represent only the specific fieldbus devices and fieldbus system networks they are connected to. Overall plant field device system network topology and system status is typically not represented in the FDT frame application. The exclusion of system network topology and system status from the conventional FDT frame application complicates overall system management from the user perspective.
Another deficiency within the conventional FDT frame application is that control systems are increasingly incorporating multiple fieldbus networks and third party devices into the plant field device system network. This presents the additional challenge of seamlessly managing the configuration of third party fieldbus devices along with the native devices.
Further complicating the picture is that conventional FDT technology provides a standardized framework that allows different fieldbus device types from any manufacturer to be configured and monitored from the FDT frame application. Using the FDT frame application requires building up the system topology using communication, gateway, and device DTMs to represent the system topology and facilitate the actual communication between the DTMs and the frame application. The standardized interface used to normalize the interaction between the frame application and the different types of DTMs imposes severe restrictions on the way the system topology is represented, the types of interactions that are allowed, and the way the DTMs are visualized.